by Deepak Chopra, MD
February 20, 2013

What creates the best teams? I teach a course at the Kellogg School of Management Northwestern University for executives. It’s called “The Soul of Leadership,” and over and over again the question has come up, “What creates the best teams?”

So here are the three ingredients of best teams:

1. They have a shared vision, which they feel deeply
2. They are emotionally bonded.
3. Every member of the team compliments the strengths of every other member in the team. That’s it.

The best examples of these of course are sports teams. When you have two teams with basically equal competencies, the team that wins is the one that has those characteristics (the one’s listed above).

So once again these are: a shared vision deeply felt, emotionally bonded, and third where every member compliments the strengths of the other. There’s a lot more that goes into team building. Shared vision is the first thing, but emotional bonds means you are free of emotional resentments, grievances, jealousies of the other members of the team. You understand their emotions and they understand your emotions. You communicate in a way that displays or is authentically an expression of affection, attention, and appreciation.

And finally beyond emotional freedom and emotional bonding there is also emotional resilience. You know how to get over the ups and downs of life. So there you are–and you compliment each other’s strengths. So you know in soccer, the forward and the goalie and the quarterback all have strengths and they compliment each other, but that’s true of anything in business as well.

So where my strengths, for example, are: futuristic, adaptable, strategic, and maximizing my energy–and also thinking in a way where I can connect everybody else. My weaknesses sometimes lie in execution so I compliment that weakness with people that know how to execute. Okay. That in a nutshell is what creates a great team.

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